Obama’s Double-Standard on Russia

He Attacks Russia, then Condemn’s Putin for Defending Russia from His Attack

Eric Zuesse

Ukraine is considered by geostrategists (both Republican and Democratic) to be militarily the most important adjoining nation to Russia, serving as the chief buffer to attacks against Russia from the west. Since 1783, Russia has had its key Black Sea naval base located in Crimea, which used to be part of Russia 1783-1954; the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev blithely donated Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, though the residents in Crimea didn’t want that – and no referendum was taken on it. After the Soviet Union broke up in 1992, this naval base continued but instead on a long-term lease from Ukraine.

For Ukraine to become anti-Russian would be like for Mexico to become anti-American: even worse than when Cuba became anti-American in 1959. Mexico, of course, isn’t anti-American, but, during Barack Obama’s second term, Ukraine did, indeed, become anti-Russian. It happened not via any democratic revolution (such as American propaganda pretended), but via a bloody coup. Here is how it transpired:

After Mr. Obama (who had been raised surrounded by CIA operatives) finally became elected to a second term, he switched his key official controlling Ukrainian policy from the benign internationalist Philip Gordon, who considered America’s chief enemy to be global jihadism, to the hard-right America-supremacist Victoria Nuland, who considers America’s chief enemy to be instead the nation of Russia.

Nuland had originally been brought into Bill Clinton’s Administration when the nationalistic Russia-hater Strobe Talbott in Clinton’s State Department made her his Chief of Staff; she then became Vice President Dick Cheney’s foreign-affairs advisor, and was brought back again into the State Department by Hillary Clinton in 2011. In September 2013, Nuland was promoted to become Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, working under John Kerry, and she promptly set herself to the task of overthrowing the democratically elected pro-Russian Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych – to turn Ukraine from pro-Russian to anti-Russian.

Here is Nuland, speaking by phone with Obama’s Ambassador to Ukraine, on 4 February 2014, telling him whom to get to be appointed as the leader of Ukraine after the democratically elected pro-Russian President of Ukraine will be overthrown on 22 February 2014, which happened just 18 days later in a very bloody coup. (BBC took down that video; so, this one will now have to do.) The man she chose, “Yats,” got the appointment. The founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor has said that this was “the most blatant coup in history.” The Czech President has said that “only poorly informed people” don’t know that it was a coup and equate it with Czechoslovakia’s authentically democratic 1968 “Velvent Revolution” against the Soviet Union. Instead of the tactful “poorly informed,” the simple reality is: deceived. The American public are deceived.

Here is a member of Ukraine’s parliament, or Rada, speaking on 20 November 2013, prior to the start of “Maidan” demonstrations against Yanukovych, and even before Yanukovych had announced that he would turn down the EU’s offer to Ukraine, in which this parliamentarian is describing in remarkable detail the preparations that the U.S. Embassy already had underway to produce a coup which would bring down Yanukovych and replace him with a leader who would be controlled from Washington. Hackers had gotten into the American Embassy’s emails, and this parliamentarian reported what they had discovered. He says:

“American instructors explained there how social networks and Internet technologies can be used for targeted manipulation of public opinion as well as to activate potential protest to provoke violent unrest on the territory of Ukraine – radicalization of the population, and triggering of infighting. American instructors show examples of successful use of social networks to organize protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. ‘Tech Camp’ representatives currently hold conferences throughout Ukraine. A total of five events have been held so far.”

This plan was built upon something that the previous Ambassador (whom Obama had appointed in 2009) had actually started even before Nuland was appointed. Here is an announcement from the Embassy in Ukraine, on 1 March 2013, titled, “U.S. Embassy Hosted TechCamp Kyiv 2.0 to Build Technological Capacity of Civil Society.” (That Ambassador is now our Ambassador to Russia.)

So: this was a coup, arranged in the White House. It was Obama to Kerry to Nuland to Pyatt.

Here is the phone-conversation right after the coup, in which the Foreign Affairs chief of the EU receives from her investigator in Kiev, his finding as to what had happened – that it was a coup and not a democratic overthrow, not a democratic revolution at all.

Vladimir Putin knew about all of these things while they were happening. He knew that Obama was clearly set upon attacking Russia and on using Ukraine as the proxy-state to get the conflict going. He acted promptly on this knowledge: For example, he sent an advanced ABM missile system to Crimea – suitable to shoot down planes or anything – to prevent the Ukrainian Air Force from attacking Crimea in the lead-up to the 16 Marcch 2014 referendum.

As I have pointed out previously, the population of Crimea, both before and after the coup, wanted very much to return to Russia. The 96% vote for that in the 16 March 2014 Crimean referendum turns out to be exactly concordant with the Gallup polls that the U.S. Government commissioned and that were taken both before and after the referendum. Gallup found overwhelming public support in Crimea for returning to Russia, and found that overwhelmingly the 500 Crimeans who were sampled after the referendum thought that the 96% vote for returning to Russia was authentically reflecting Crimean opinion on the matter.

Now, with that as the actual history of America’s aggression against Russia during President Obama’s second term, consider that, on 16 March 2015, which was the first anniversary of the referendum in Crimea, Jen Psaki, at the U.S. State Department headlined, “One Year Later – Russia’s Occupation of Crimea,” and she said:

“On this one year anniversary of the sham ‘referendum’ in Crimea, held in clear violation of Ukrainian law and the Ukrainian constitution, the United States reiterates its condemnation of a vote that was not voluntary, transparent, or democratic. We do not, nor will we, recognize Russia’s attempted annexation and call on President Putin to end his country’s occupation of Crimea.”

This is the way that the U.S., which is occupying Ukraine (by coup), talks about Russia, which protected the Crimeans from being subjected to the hell that the people in Donbass are now experiencing from the Ukrainian Occupying Regime, no legal Government at all. And, for that – the sheer illegality of what Obama did – just read this. Then consider that Obama is demanding that the entirely undemocratic and forced transfer of Crimea by the Soviet dictator Khrushchev in 1954 must stand as being legal, while this entirely democratic plebiscite on the issue in 2014 must be called “not voluntary, transparent, or democratic.” That takes some nerve (and a deceived public).

Ms. Psaki continues with her string of lies, including:

“Over the last year, the human rights situation in Crimea has deteriorated dramatically, with mounting repression of minority communities and faiths, in particular Crimean Tatars, and systematic denial of fundamental freedoms. Local residents have been detained, interrogated, and disappeared and NGOs and independent media have been driven out of the peninsula. These brutalities are unacceptable and we call on Russia to stop further abuses.”

Obama is the aggressor here, just as Hitler was the aggressor in Poland in 1939. And O’Bomba blames Russia as the aggressor, just as Hitler blamed Poland.

Obama overthrew the legal Government, and replaced it by this illegal one. But now he criticizes Putin as if he were the aggressor instead of the defender here. And Obama demands that the Soviet dictator’s forced transfer of Crimea to Ukraine be legal and that Putin’s defense of Crimeans’ democratic self-determination in response to that coup be considered illegal.

It’s the Big Lie, all over again, but this time backed by, and yet also up against, nuclear weapons, and thus far more dangerous than before.

How did America manage to be headed by such a monster? We Americans need to ponder that. This isn’t a partisan issue. I voted for Obama both times, as the lesser of two evils. But now both Parties are outright rotten. This is not a democracy any longer. Illusions to the contrary must end – and soon. Before we get to World War III.